Terminal
by sydneythecat
Summary: We are all souls glowing ever brighter, trapped in shells growing ever weaker. / Bixanna one-shot! / terminal illness AU / Rated M for brief language /


**Disclaimer: **I do not own Fairy Tail. If I did, A) It would be way more depressing/realistic at times and B) Bixlow and Lisanna would be at it like rabbits with a habit. Yuh.

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**Terminal**

_Bixanna one-shot_

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His lower lip was trembling.

Hers was still.

Soft as a baby bird's first, hopeful flap of the wings, his fist unfolded into a weak palm, and he crashed to the ground. Her smooth eyelids were the mighty oak branches where his nest was safely hidden. It stretched farther out of reach as he fell, and fell, and fell. He couldn't even bring himself to recall the irises beneath the pale curtains as his back collided with solid Earth.

He turned his gaze to her arm, lying in disordered shambles where it had fallen from gingerly caressing his rough cheek. It had happened so softly, so quickly. She was murmuring and then she wasn't. It just sounded like she was fighting off sleep. He just assumed it had won this time.

Of course he assumed wrong. Of course.

It was like the whole room froze. The air smelled like clean syringes and sterile bedpans. His eyes had rolled back into his skull a little, and his neck gave. All at once, he had fallen to his knees and pushed an ear against her motionless chest.

But that's the thing.

He saw everything in slow motion. The window's drapes and their slight rise and fall from the air conditioner's invisible hands, the slow drip of morphine into the IV bag. He could smell disinfectant in the hall, and dinner being prepared in the hospital cafeteria four doors down. He could smell the wilting tulips on her bedside table. He felt the cold railing of her bed, and the scratch of denim jeans against the skin of his thighs.

But the thing is, he couldn't hear. He couldn't hear the nurses bustling into the room behind him. He didn't hear the uninterrupted alarm pouring from the monitors; he didn't hear the flatline. He didn't hear her heartbeat.

He was pressing his ear so hard against her chest it was as if he was trying to crawl inside the lifeless cavity.

"Lis, Lis, Lis."

Was it a prayer?

"Lisanna, baby, I love you."

Was it a curse?

_"Lisanna!"_

"Sir, we're going to attempt resuscitation."

He was being pulled at, and he let himself be deposited into a chair in the far corner of the room by a pair of urgent hands. He watched with empty eyes as the herd of nurses, clad head to toe in pale blues and whites converged upon his fiancée's shell. The urgent hands that had moved him left the room, and quickly reappeared with more IV bags.

Bixlow sat, dumbstruck and soulless in the entirely too small chair. The way his long legs bent and angled out of it would have been comical, were it not for the situation unfolding before him. Lisanna would have been laughing at him, if she could see.

I'll just stay here until she _can_ see it, he thought. She'll want something to laugh about when this is all over. When it's all over…

This had been going on for a year, now. She'd only been given four months, but they had made it this far. Experimental treatments and trials, bucket lists, conversations with an air of seriousness to them that made the both of them, jesters through and through, want to crawl out of their skins and vomit rainbows. They just weren't built to wallow in this kind of doom and gloom.

True to her nature, she had taken it all in stride.

"I died once," she said, with a smile on her face that would make a passerby believe she was talking about winning a million dollars. "And if you really think about it, that time I was murdered! By my own brother, no less." She snorted and tossed a wink at him.

Lisanna Strauss didn't care about the grass on the other side of the fence. She didn't even care about her own backyard. She just knew grass could grow and it could die, and it didn't faze her because she'd seen every patch on the planet by now. What was one more bent blade?

And here Bixlow was, trying to convince himself that he should stay in that doll-sized chair so she could have a laugh at his expense when the nurses brought her back from the dead. That would be the first thing she would want. Laughter. He knew it.

But he cared about a bent blade. He cared about the worry beneath the critical expressions on the nurses' faces. He cared about the way they won battle after battle only for the war to rage on. He cared about the fact that, for all intents and purposes, her time was up, and the last thing she said to him might very well be the last thing she ever said at all. So he rose from the tiny chair, and moved to stand at the foot of her bed. He looked at Lisanna's heart rate monitor and saw that they had been able to get a pulse, and she was stable. This wasn't the first time this had happened, and he had learned not to look at the machines until everyone in the room had stopped acting like one. The nurses left the room, one by one, until only the one with the urgent hands from earlier remained.

"She's stable," was all she said.

"Thank you," was his only reply.

And she exited to her post, just feet away from Lisanna's room. That nurse was the only one who didn't spare Bixlow piteous glance after glance, or feel responsible to apologize for something that wasn't even her fault, or offer prayer to a God he didn't believe in. Her name was Anna, and He could tell that she was the one out of all of them who cared the most, because unlike the rest, she was more invested in saying, "she's stable," than, "I'll pray for you."

Bixlow stood as still as a statue at the foot of Lisanna's bed, and watched the promise of her breathing chest. She was alive. His shoulders shook with unshed tears, and he played with the idea of letting a few escape for a bit. The final verdict was always the same, though: he could cry if she left for good. As long as she was here, he would smile. He took a few deep breaths, and his shoulders stilled and his mind calmed. He stood there and gazed at her for some time, and marveled at the fact that even the most incredible people are susceptible to life. It's the slowest of poisons, or the best of memories gone by far too fast. For Bixlow, it had always been the latter. Same for Lisanna. She was forthright, excited, witty as hell, and gorgeous. But life gave her something new: terminal. She was terminal, now. It didn't matter how wonderful or fantastic or compassionate or happy she was. She was terminal.

"You scared me that time," he mumbled, reaching a hand behind his head to scratch lazily at the nape of his neck. There'd been a lot of this: talking to her while she slept. She slept a lot these days, and there was still a lot he wanted to say. The way he saw it, her subconscious was hearing him. Her dreams knew. That was enough.

"You know, I'm starting to think that maybe you should be in the Book of Earthland Records." His smile was faint, and he moved to sit down next to her bed. "How many times have you technically died, now? Like, nine?" A tan hand reached out and took her slender, pale one into its embrace. He sat there for a moment and just stared at the contrast between their two shells: he was soaked in sunshine, and it looked like she'd never seen a drop of it in her life. But her soul… it was fucking made of the stuff. It lit up his whole damn world.

"Nine times, huh," her fragile voice wheezed, and his head snapped up to find a pair of pale pink lips smiling weakly at him. "That's at least Wizard Saint Worthy."

"At the _very_ least," he replied, voice soft. He leaned over the bed to take her face into his hands and brush his lips across her forehead. He started to sit back down, but a skeletal fist latched onto the collar of his shirt and pulled him back down to her mouth. It took his breath away. She kissed him with a fierceness he hadn't felt in probably seven months, and he found that he still recognized every individual flame as each one licked at the edges of his heart. The kiss became languid and her mouth grew pliant, and Bixlow understood she had exhausted herself. He pulled away and was surprised to see tears streaming down her face.

"Hey," he busied himself with wiping away the little rivers.

"That time scared me, too," she choked out between sobs, "it scared me…"

Before she could protest, Bixlow scooped her into his arms and kicked off his shoes. He climbed into the hospital bed with her, and laid her back down as gently as possible so as not to disturb the various cords and tubes connected to her. She was taken aback, but the way she curled into his broad chest spoke of her gratitude. She lodged her heart shaped face into the curve of his shoulder and breathed in as deeply as her brittle lungs could manage. Lisanna did this for a few blessed moments, simply drinking in the smell of him.

"Lis," he murmured, and she gave a soft grunt in reply.

"I want to tell you something, and I want you to… to really listen."

She lifted her face to look at him, but was only met with a strong jawline and the slight stubble she loved to lightly scratch while he slept. He was looking straight ahead, focused on something but nothing was there.

"I will," she said at last, and his shocking green eyes closed.

"There is only one of you."

Lisanna stared up at him, confused. She was about to say something along the lines of, "No shit, Sherlock," when Bixlow quickly spoke again.

"There's only one Lisanna Strauss. When I see souls, I see the core of them whether I want to or not, because the core of them is what shines the brightest… or sometimes not at all." He cleared his throat, and opened his eyes again. Lisanna was surprised to see them glowing, and they turned upon her. A shiver wracked up her feeble spine.

"Yours… Even right now, _yours is the brightest that I have ever seen_." He reached down to cup her cheek with his hand; thumb softly caressing the bridge of her nose. "The core of it is so perfect. It's so dauntless that it doesn't even consider the shell it's in. It just is. I've never seen that, not in my whole life." Bixlow shifted on the bed to look her fully in the face, and what she found in his eyes stalled the breath in her lungs.

"We are all just souls with shells. And yours, no matter what happens to this body, yours will never stop being." A solitary tear broke from her left eye, and he wiped it away with his thumb.

"It just... _is_." He paused and chewed on his thoughts. "I don't know how else to say it. But I do know that whatever happens, my soul will always love yours."

Her lips crashed against his. She didn't care if that was the end of what he was saying; she just knew that it was all she needed to hear. He kissed her back with all the love he possessed, cradling her by the neck, long eyelashes fluttering against her cheeks, unbidden tears spilling from his closed eyes.

"Idiot," she said between kisses. "Idiot, idiot, idiot."

She pushed him back and stared him straight in the face.

"You're an absolute idiot if you think this shell is going anywhere anytime soon." Her gaze was fiercer than he'd seen in months. "I mean, I appreciate the sentiment…" She said, blood flushing her sickly cheeks. "But, save it."

She curled up against his chest again, reveling in the way that small action cured her nauseating homesickness.

"I'm not going anywhere," she repeated softly, and the exhaustion overtook her once again, and she fell into a deep sleep in Bixlow's arms.

He was content with that. Either way, she was right. She wasn't going anywhere. And frankly, either way neither was he. That's exactly what he was getting at. She was a cyclone of passion and his eyes were addicted to the way her nose scrunched up when she smiled, and he would not leave her side. Not even after the supposed "end."

He would be lying if he said he didn't take an overwhelming amount of comfort in the sway of her shoulders as she breathed in and out, but he would be lying _and_ stupid if he said that he believed in an end. No, he didn't believe in God. But no matter how hard he had tried to convince himself in the lonelier times of his life that his solitary soul wouldn't continue on for eternity, he just couldn't accept that. He saw the proof of everlasting spirits high in the treetops of forests, the canopies riddled with families of them for miles on end. Towering over the ocean in supernatural swells and waves, they spilled from the salty foam and onto the shore. They covered fields of lavender. Their light erupted and sang as gusts of wind whipped them to and fro. Once the lonelier times of his life had passed, and he had witnessed true beauty when he laid eyes on Lisanna's star-drenched soul, he stopped trying to convince himself eternity was a falsehood. He wanted nothing more than eternity with her.

And he knew it would happen. It didn't matter that she was terminal. It didn't matter that he'd seen her body give out nine times. It didn't matter that he wasn't dying with her. He would see her, when his time came. Because even though the sea was full with souls, and even though the sky was a tangled mess of their lights and dancing, and even though there seemed to be ten of them flying through the summer air for every one person simply walking along the sidewalk, even though sometimes they all seemed to be one giant slice of sunlight, no one distinguishable from the next... he knew he would find her.

Because she was the brightest he'd ever seen, and not even death could make him forget the way she had brought his soul to life.

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**A/N: **Bixanna is probably my favorite ship in all of Fairy Tail and it ISN'T EVEN REMOTELY IN THE REALM OF CANON UGH. I blame Blanania for this crack obsession. also;jfal.

Anyway, hope you enjoy some lovely Bixanna angst/true loooooove. I've been having the feels lately. This is how I deal with it... write super sad stuff where people die.

please leave a review! I like reading those. Happy days.

xo syd


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